The life and work of Kiki Smith RA

Kiki Smith is on a journey without end

And that’s precisely how she likes it. "I’m not trying to get anywhere in life, and my work is the same. It has no particular agenda. It is not about arriving somewhere specific." The title of the American artist’s 2019 show at Modern Art Oxford, I am a wanderer, captures this meandering sensibility. "It’s like being in a garden. You might circle slowly around the same flower or plant, the things you’ve investigated before. But sometimes, you spot something new, a thing you’ve never noticed before."

Her work is a modern-day bestiary

Deer, snakes, foxes, frogs, cats, lizards and birds of all kinds roam through her output. One of her earliest works to feature animals was Untitled (Crows) (1995), a collection of dead crows cast in bronze recently strewn across a gallery floor in a show of her work at the Lower Belvedere in Vienna. Smith made the installation in response to a news story about a flock of birds falling lifeless from the sky. "There are plenty of strange death phenomena in nature, but because it happened in New Jersey, where I’m from, I felt somehow responsible."

But while threats lurk at the edges of her work, references to ecological disaster are kept oblique. "It’s a slippery slope for artists to talk about the environment, because art relies on resources too. And it’s one thing to make pictures, but it’s another to alleviate suffering."

She refuses to settle on one discipline
"While I’m monogamous in my marriage, I’m not when it comes to materials," Smith chuckles. "I could probably make etchings for the rest of my life quite happily, but I get distracted." This has led to work in plaster, wax, bronze, glass and porcelain, and while best known as a sculptor, she is also a prolific maker of tapestries, prints, embroideries and photographs. "I’m curious as to how something exists when you make it in glass, then in paper, say. Each material has a very different feeling."

Animals and humans coalesce

Betraying a fascination with mythology and folklore, her animal forms often connect or merge with the female figure. Woman with Owl (2004) features the bird outstretching from the head of a woman like a headdress, while Rapture (2001) depicts a woman stepping naked from the stomach of a wolf, a lost myth of origins. "This way of making sculpture started from my collage drawings," she says. "Sometimes things just fall together and intersect, at other times I’m curious to see how something looks."

Scale matters

In general, she favours work she can carry. "In New York city, I live up five flights of stairs so sometimes it’s about making life manageable. Plus, I like making knick-knacks." In fact, size is rarely incidental in her work, and she often draws true to scale. "I think it came from my father [American abstract sculptor Tony Smith], this sense of the integrity of scale. However his sculptures were very large, sometimes several storeys high, and until I was about 40, I never made anything bigger than a bread box."

She is building her first studio

It will be near to her home in upstate New York, a Dutch colonial house where she spends time when she isn’t teaching in the city. Up until now, she has only made work at her kitchen table or in shared specialist facilities. "I did actually have a studio once before, for about six months, but it became a huge mess and I hated it so this is a bit of an experiment. My house is dark, but the studio is full of light and space. And is there anything more generous in the world than that?"

Making art is about keeping faith

"I try not to question too much why I’m doing something, or what it is while I’m doing it," explains the artist. "Next to my bed I have a little place-card, and on it I wrote 'blind faith', so I’d look at those words every day. It is not your job as an artist to over-analyse what you’re doing. Your job is just to do it, and let the chips fall where they may."

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